Greetings from Las Vegas. Google ended its Leaders Circle with a spectacular event at the Sphere—we were treated to a preview of a "making of" video for the upcoming release of The Wizard of Oz, reimagined by Sphere Studios in partnership with Google Cloud, Google DeepMind, Magnopus, and Warner Bros. It was truly awesome.
I'm not sure you'd call this a remaster; it's more of a reinvention. Using Veo, Imagen 3, and Gemini, Google rebuilt the film—scene by scene—to fill the Sphere’s gigantic 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen.
It was clearly a daunting technological challenge. The original film was shot in 4:3 and never intended for a 270-degree immersive experience, so Google used outpainting to generate visuals far beyond the original frame, and applied performance generation to reconstruct full-body movements of characters who were only ever filmed from the waist up (or never in the filmed scene at all). More than 90 per cent of the movie was altered or extended to transform this Hollywood classic into the Sphere's unique format.
To say this project was ambitious is an understatement. Much of what was done was considered impractically hard—or even impossible—until this team made it happen. Now that these techniques exist, Hollywood has some powerful new tools to play with. Outpainting and performance generation are now possible at extremely high resolution. While we all get to enjoy a beloved classic in a new way, we can thank Jim Dolan for this glimpse into the future of storytelling.
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Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
